How a Dutch woman became an entrepreneur in Beirut - with a little help from her friends

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Last week in Beirut, a crowd of
native Beirutis and foreigners gathered at newly-launched
Mezzanine café – the tasty addition toAlt
City's funky coworking space – to discover Living Lebanon, a travel guide and soon-to-be-launched
discovery website for Lebanon.

Writing a guide book on Lebanon
is a risky move that most guidebooks, including Lonely
Planet, refuse to take. This is understandable, as
political instabilities have had a tough impact on tourism,
making it almost impossible to get a return on
investment.

But still, there's a need. The
few existing guidebooks for travelers, expats, and locals, are
outdated, and feature deceptive maps with incorrect or incomplete
trip information, mostly because the writers fail to capture the
Lebanese ways of doing things.

So, who would be crazy enough to
spend a year traveling through the country, reviewing hotels,
spending weeks mapping the trickiest road intersections, and months
getting accurate information on bus routes?

Leaving a comfortable life in
Amsterdam

Saskia Nout, that's who. Nout,
originally from Amsterdam, never imagined that she would one day be
building a multimedia project in the Middle East. Two years ago,
she was a Project Manager in an oncology lab, conducting clinical
research, living comfortably in Amsterdam, owning
a car, an apartment, and a bicycle. Yet, her ordinary
life made her bored and unhappy.

So, she decided to leave the
country. After traveling to South Africa, where she took care of
lions, to Beirut where she learned Arabic, to Camino de Santiago,
where she reflected on her life (read the storyon her blog), she made up her mind,
quit everything in Holland, and decided to move to Beirut to work
on - what else? - a travel guide, the one thing she knew people
needed, and that she could create without too much
investment.

Nout gathered her savings and
calculated that she could survive a year and a half if she cut
unnecessary expenses. This was enough to write the book; she would
figure out the rest later, she thought.

How one becomes an
entrepreneur without realizing it

Nout has never been shy about
her book, something that made it easy for her to gather a lot of
feedback and to meet people interested in being part of the
project.

"Everyone that I spoke to was super enthusiastic. I managed to
arrange things for free, and everybody was helping,” she says.
First, a friend offered to design the maps, and then a friend of
her mother's who works as an editor offered to edit the book for
free. Finally, a friend offered to design the cover.

At that point, Nout realized that all that was left was the design
of the book, so she taught herself how to use InDesign - again,
getting friends to help her with some issues - and finished the
book.

Going for
a crowdsourced approach was an easy decision to make. As
the organization part worked itself out naturally, all that
was left was the many advantages: retaining control over her
product, and saving a lot of money. And, by then, Nout knew that she had to cut costs and
avoid working with publishers and bookstores as much as possible if
she wanted to generate profit, in such a small market.

So, she decided to self-publish
her book. She found a printer, paid for a first round of books, and
talked to several famous café owners familiar with her project, and
convinced them to sell it for a smaller cut than bookstores would
take, creating a win-win situation, as they hoped to get new
customers from the deal.

This could have been the end of
the story. But someone approached Nout to co-found a website based
on Living Lebanon, which will launch in a couple of months. She was
also introduced to someone interested in promoting her book, as it
would co-promote his project. "That’s what I like about Lebanon:
everybody is an entrepreneur, with a restaurant or a project to
promote,” she says.

In November, Studio Beirut, a platform that
creates social awareness, and claims social spaces in Lebanon, will
co-organize the official launch party of Living Lebanon. They plan
on giving an “avant-gout du Liban”: a tasting that recreates the
full experience of Lebanon in a 14,000 meters square old
refurbished factory, with some of Lebanon's finest food and
drink-makers to feature their best dishes, artists to showcase
their art, and musicians to transform the night into a typical
Beirut party.

Now, the book is on sale for $20
USD at AltCity, and
popular Hamra hangouts Café Younes, Dar
Bistro and Books, independent bookstore El Bourj, major bookstore
chains Antoine, and Saifi Urban Gardens, a
well-known trendy hostel/innovative Arabic school/hip rooftop
bar/traditional communal restaurant. Nout is currently closing some
additional retail deals, and is getting ready to sell the e-book on
her yet-to-be-launched website.